Cooks, Clowns and Cowboys: 101 Skills and Experiences to Discover on your Travels

★★★☆☆

Cooks, Clowns and Cowboys: 101 Skills and Experiences to Discover on your Travels (2012)

Cooks, Clowns and Cowboys book cover

By thirty different authors, which I will not individually name.

Once again I have lost my index note. Really, how hard can it be? Just need to stick it in the middle somewhere after finishing the book instead of doing who-knows-what. But it’s not like I had many notes anyway.

Can I do a point form this time?? let’s see.

Likes:

  • The cozy feeling. Now this is what I consider a cozy book to be. You can read about all these low-stakes fun exotic activities, then stay all home and cozy and not do all those fun exotic things.
  • The photos add a lot, although a few activities don’t translate well to pictures.
  • The variety. Lots of food-related stuff, some dance-related stuff, but a lot of unique activities I wouldn’t have guessed. “Parahawking” being one.

filler words because why not: I lowkey want to go skydiving sometime. Or parahawking. It’s not a fear of heights stopping me. I love heights! It’s the idea of having a strange man strapped to my back. Just let me jump alone. I’d LITERALLY rather risk falling to my death.

Developing countries seem to be way better bang for your buck. The downsides being: 1) Many of them are far away, so the plane ticket costs more, and 2) Many of the locals won’t speak English. But if you can bypass one or both drawbacks, why not go there instead?

I feel like they’re better aspirational vacation spots than, like, Paris, Dubai, Italy. Or JAPAN. This is directed at one specific person, but you won’t know who!!

what kind of female side do you have? Sissy maid? Mommy’s little girl? Pregnant?

Real quote from Page 61, Cross-Dress For Success In New York. Wild for a 2012 book.

Dislikes:

  • Overrepresentation of America. I feel like New York alone has as many entries as all of China.

  • The currency. I wish there had been some way to compare the prices at a glance. How much is 6500 Pacific francs vs HK$1600 vs 75,000 rupiah? One of the Mongolian activities was priced in New Zealand Dollar, because it was organized by Kiwis.

  • I think the book wasn’t able to print special characters of any form, even accents. Wang (王) on page 179 just showed up as a sad little box.

  • This book is nearly fifteen years old and some of the practical details will be outdated by now. A few of the activities were only bookable by calling a single phone number. There’s an elephant training one in Thailand that I’m pretty sure is illegal in 2026 because you’re not looking at blurry elephants footprints through binoculars because ~they’re wild animals~

TA-DAAA! On to the next.